red herring

www.techdirt.com

ChurchHatesTucker points us to the latest news about Aereo, the service that has been facing endless opposition and jumping through countless legal hoops just to be able to offer a simple service that lets people watch public TV broadcasts online. Undaunted, Aereo recently announced plans to launch in Boston,...

www.pcworld.com

Google is launching a new fund through which it will make later-stage investments in technology companies, a Google executive said Wednesday.The fund, to be called Google Capital, will be announced this summer but has already made three investments to date, said Mike Pearson, a general partner at Google Capital,...

www.techdirt.com

This morning at CES, Senator Ron Wyden laid out a broad and detailed agenda for how Congress can and should promote internet freedom and increase innovation -- mainly by focusing on knocking down the barriers presented by legacy players who don't want to adapt or compete. Among other things, he...

betabeat.com

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (Wikimedia) The Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam, a group of cyber-attackers who have targeted Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange, allegedly struck J.P. Morgan Chase today. Fox Business reported on the site outage at Chase.com and consulted with Flashpoint Partners about the problems....

readwrite.com

Owen Thomas is actually a nice guy. The new editor-in-chief of ReadWrite has often been cited for his controversial and influential opinions on sites such as Business Insider, VentureBeat, Suck.com and, of course, Valleywag. Here are seven things you didn't know about the man who's been called "the Perez Hilton...

techcrunch.com

You’re a new startup on the tech scene in Europe, perhaps you’re a brand new entrepreneur. One day you get an email saying you’ve been shortlisted as a finalist for a “prestigious” award, putting you in the “Top 200″ in Europe, out of “hundreds of applications”. Of course, hungry for...

techcrunch.com

To continue to operate in the 21st century as if it is still the 20th is certain death for most businesses. Not instant, but certain. And it was certainly this existential crisis that is leading the publishers to cling together. The resulting business will have to change just the same,...

Comments on 'Quick, Tie The Rafts Together':

gigaom.com

Nick Bilton, in his Disruptions column for the New York Times, lamented the echo chamber of Silicon Valley. Sometimes, Hollywood screenwriters create scripts filled with inside jokes that only people in Hollywood could appreciate. Sometimes, New York media writers write about other New York media writers. And sometimes, tech entrepreneurs in...

www.guardian.co.uk

No computer can yet pass the 'Turing test' and be taken as human. But the hunt for artificial intelligence is moving in a different, exciting direction that involves creativity, language – and even jazz'I propose to consider the question "Can machines think?"' Not my question but the opening of Alan...

www.businessinsider.com

Apple just published a patent that imagines what an iPhone would look like if the whole phone body were a wrapound screen. Here's what Apple's drawing looks like, via Patently Apple: Patently Apple's summary of Apple's patent filing: Today's invention focuses on the flexible wraparound display that could be fashioned...

radar.oreilly.com

In 2010, electronic privacy needed digital due process. In 2012, it’s worth defending your vanishing rights online. This week, there’s an important issue before Washington that affects everyone who sends email, stores files in Dropbox or sends private messages on social media. In January, O’Reilly Media went dark in opposition...

siliconangle.com

Github, the popular code sharing site, suffered a major security exploit today when an unauthorized user pushed a commit to the Ruby on Rails project. The problem appears to be a flaw in Ruby on Rails, which is not just hosted by Github but is used to run Github....

www.insidemobileapps.com

GREE expands platform partnerships with Vostu, Brainz and more — GREE has signed partnership deals with five more international studios. The company announced this week it has signed up Vostu, Brainz, Sun Dried Games, Pangalore and Vast Studios. Our readers may remember in October GREE announced it had signed...

techcrunch.com

Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers...

www.engadget.com

After initially announcing it would come in May, and then dropping a countdown red herring, the PureView is finally opening its big 808-eye in India today. The 41MP camera (and phone!) lands with a 33,899 Rupee ($600) MSRP, depending on your barter skills. The PureView might not be a...

techdirt.com

Steve Jobs fired the latest salvo in the ongoing Apple-Adobe spat today, with his "Thoughts on Flash" posted on the Apple site. In short, he says that Adobe looking out just for its own interests in drawing developers to its "100% proprietary" Flash ecosystem while Apple supports a great, open...

paidcontent.org

A court filing provides new insight into Apple’s version of events concerning an incident in which Steve Jobs told a reporter that “unhappy” publishers might withhold e-books from Amazon. According to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), lawyers “mischaracterized” the exchange and Jobs simply meant to say that his company had a...

thenextweb.com

All of this talk of Twitter’s aspiration to becoming a media company is a red herring. Media companies supply the nut (content) inside the shell – Twitter wants to be the shell. Does that make Twitter a “technology” company? Well, “heck yes” comes to mind, but it’s the kind of technology company that we...

www.techdirt.com

We've been covering the Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Labs case for a few years now, as it was a key case involving whether or not you could patent basic medial diagnostics -- i.e., can you patent basic science and limit doctors from doing such science without paying up. Tragically, in...

www.mathewingram.com

Updated: I enjoy a good debate about media-related topics pretty much any time, even when I’m supposed to be on vacation with the family in Florida. Today, in between playing shuffleboard and bocce and taking the kids to the swimming pool, I had a rousing back-and-forth on Twitter with Howard...

www.zdnet.com

Most of the commentary I've read so far about the loss of Google Reader has been about its use as an RSS client. But that's a red herring. The real victims were companies that had planned in 2005 and 2006 to build RSS sync engines. Google stomped them out of...

gigaom.com

The battle between traditional media and the blogosphere over aggregation (or “curation,” if you prefer) continues to rage. In the latest skirmish, Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill got thrown under the bus by many for a recent blog post in which she summarized a New York Times piece about data-mining...

www.pcmech.com

A few days ago, we celebrated a well-earned victory against the Old Guard. SOPA and PIPA were called unconstitutional. They were shelved, their proponents were defeated, and all was well on the ‘net. For about an hour. Something’s recently come into play that casts SOPA and PIPA in a whole...

www.ocdqblog.com

thenextweb.com

Serving as a way for The Pirate Bay users to continue visiting the file-sharing website despite blocks by numerous ISPs in the UK, the UK Pirate Party has been formally requested by British music industry body — the BPI — to take down its proxy, dismissing the party’s free speech...

www.guardian.co.uk

The Society of Authors' suspicion of e-lending is misguidedShould public libraries lend ebooks? The Society of Authors has called on culture minister Ed Vaizey to address concerns that library e-lending is "undervaluing retail pricing" and encouraging piracy. The writers' union says it remains "strongly of the view that remote lending...

www.insidemobileapps.com

Meeker: 46 million apps downloaded on iOS every day — About 46 million apps are downloaded from Apple’s iTunes App Store every day, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner Mary Meeker. Meeker revealed the information during this week’s D 10 Conference. Pre-paid iPhone coming — Apple has given Cricket...

techcrunch.com

Nokia and Motorola had their day in the device spotlight yesterday, and today it Amazon’s turn, with Apple’s next week. So in the middle of all of this, just to make sure we don’t forget about it, Samsung has released some numbers on sales of its newest smartphone, the Galaxy...

gizmodo.com

According to this video showing Cydia multitasking and this tweet by a member of the Dev Team, iPhone OS 4.0 has been jailbroken already. Then again, Apple may have left the doors wide open as a pre-launch red herring. [MacStories] More »...